Consumer Behavior

Black Friday top holiday shopping day this year

Photo: Generated by AI. Adobe Stock.

September 23, 2025

Retailers in the U.S. will see the biggest holiday crowds on Black Friday with the last two Saturdays before Christmas taking the next two big shopping spots.

Those are findings from a Sensormatic Solutions report predicting the holiday season's top shopping days, according to a press release.

"The holiday rush is right around the corner, and competition for customer attention this year will be fierce," Tony D'Onofrio, president of Sensormatic Solutions, said in the release. "Our busiest days predictions can help retailers get a sense of what's to come and — when paired with source-to-store visibility into their supply chains — guide the path to the convenient, seamless in-store experiences shoppers crave."

Sensormatic Solutions predicts U.S. in-store traffic for the holiday season will be relatively flat to -3% compared to last year.

To date, traffic this year has been down slightly (roughly 2.5% on average) compared to last year.

In 2025, Christmas will fall on a Thursday for the first time in over a decade. While early promotions in the weeks leading up to Black Friday and concerns around product availability encourage shoppers to get gift-buying done earlier, the late-week holiday may translate into a sustained high-traffic period in the week leading up to the holiday, according to the report.

"To no one's surprise, our predictions show that Black Friday will still be the highlight of the U.S.' holiday shopping season, but retailers are likely to see some interesting deviations from recent years thanks to the calendar and changing shopper preferences," Grant Gustafson, head of retail consulting and analytics at Sensormatic Solutions, said in the release.